An electronic path for streamlining scheduling
An electronic form surgeons’ offices use to place scheduling orders has streamlined the preoperative process and sharply reduced case cancellations for a Chicago-area hospital. Cancellations are down from about 12% to less than 1% of cases since the scheduling form was introduced in early 2012. The offices took to the…
Balancing staff productivity with open OR time
With hospitals under ever greater economic pressure, perioperative managers are expected to hew closely to staffing productivity targets, meaning they must match staffing as closely as possible to the hours of surgery actually performed. They’re also expected to grow surgical volume. Hospitals’ revenue depends on it. To grow volume, ORs…
Turnover? Focus on everything else
If your OR wants to improve on-time first-case starts and turnover time—focus on everything else. That's the advice of Integris Southwest Medical Center in Oklahoma City, recently recognized as a "leading performer" for OR first-case on-time starts by VHA, Inc. Its strong performance is the outgrowth of a 4-year focus…
Flipping ORs: Does this common practice make business sense?
Flipping, double teaming, running ORs back-to-back. These are a few terms for the practice of providing multiple ORs for particular surgeons. The practice is widespread. A show of hands during a breakout session at the recent Managing Today's OR Suite conference in Orlando found nearly everyone used this practice. Flipping…
Effective block scheduling rests on fair policies, active management
Second in a series on OR performance. Performing more cases with the same OR capacity and personnel—and having more satisfied surgeons, anesthesia providers, and staff. That may sound like utopia, but there is a way to make it happen. The answer is a well-run block scheduling program. The need to…
A toolkit for managing block scheduling
HCA Inc, the national health care company, has developed a block scheduling toolkit for its 165 hospitals. The toolkit includes decision points, algorithms for managing blocks, and sample policies. Here are HCA Inc's 10 decision points for block scheduling. 1. Is this the right time for block scheduling? About 75%…
Fine-tuning the block schedule? Now could be the right time
If you want to fine-tune the block schedule, now may be the time. A silver lining of the recession is that surgeons and staff may be more accepting of changes to the schedule than they might be otherwise. With the decline in elective surgery from the economic downturn, surgeons are…
The research on OR time allocation
What criteria should be used to make decisions about adjusting block time? Traditionally, OR committees have used surgeons' utilization of blocks. But OR utilization isn't the best way to make this decision, the research shows. The method to use depends on why block time is being adjusted, notes Franklin Dexter,…
Set the clock for OR on-time starts
Achieving on-time starts can be elusive for OR leaders, including those at Memorial University Medical Center (MUMC) in Savannah, Georgia. Faced with a dismal 27% on-time starts for the first cases of the day in their 21-room OR, the leaders applied Six Sigma principles to the process. The result? A…
Ways to break loose from OR holds
OR holds slow the entire hospital's throughput. "What happens in the OR doesn't stay in the OR—it affects the whole system," says Christy Dempsey, RN, MBA, CNOR, senior vice president of clinical operations for PatientFlow Technology, Inc, Boston. The emergency department (ED) and ICU are particularly hard hit. Holds can…
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